A Barcelona Heiress by Sergio Vila-Sanjuán Read Free Book Online Page A

nun.
    “You fell from the scaffolding and the contractor didn’t let you back on the job?” he asked a man with a limp. “Our lawyers will pay him a visit and seek an amicable solution. If he refuses to take you back, we’ll have to look for other ways of convincing him.”
    “They fired you because you fight for the union?” he asked another individual who had not shaved in days. “Take five pesetas from the workers’ fund and come back each week, but when you find work you’ll have to return the money.”
    “Your wife’s been bedridden for days in intense pain?” he asked a third. “Go and visit Dr. Galcerán. He’s one of our own. I’ll write down his address for you.”
    The anarchist treated the throng with deliberate affability and they, in turn, addressed him with devotion. When the last man in line had been heard, Lacalle turned to me.
    “I apologize for the wait, but I trust that it was instructive for you to see how we operate.”
    “With all due respect, Lacalle, I would prefer you to get straight to the point. You and I are neither friends nor traveling companions. The only ties linking us are our respective relationships to María Nilo and the shooting from which we both emerged unscathed. Why have you summoned me here?”
    “I’d like you to accompany me somewhere.”
    We went out onto the street, where a luxurious Elizalde was parked, and got in. Lacalle pointed at the driver who, clad in a thick coat, occupied the open-air front seat.
    “This is Julián, a fellow member of the union. At times he lends the cause a hand on the sly by providing us with his vehicle and his services for a few hours—a small revolutionary tax, as it were.”
    The individual in question, a most intimidating character, acknowledged me with a nod. He fired up the car and in no time it was shooting along the old Port Highway winding up the mountain of Montjuïc.
    Barcelona’s great overlook, Montjuïc is a rocky massif towering over the sea, affording views over the port on one side and the Llobregat delta on the other, and stretching out towardTarragona. It is a mountain steeped in legend. The first has to do with the foundation of the city: of the nine ships Hercules deployed to aid the Trojans, one of them, the
barca nona
, or ninth ship, was lost at sea and driven by a storm far from Greece, all the way to our coasts. The story goes that it washed up at the base of Montjuïc, and there its crew founded a town, named after the vessel in question.
    There are also some who say that the mountain was the site of Laie, the primitive Iberian settlement which would give rise to the Romans’ Barcino. In any case, its rich quarries supplied stone for Barcelona’s main buildings almost since the era of imperial domination, while at the same time serving as a site for shrines and hermitages. One of these shrines, dedicated to Jupiter, could have been the source of the mountain’s name:
Mons Jovis, Monte de Júpiter, Montjuïc.
Another, more prevalent opinion, however, is that the name came from the Jewish necropolis established there in the tenth century:
Montjuïc, monte de los judíos
, the mountain of the Jews.
    Crowned by a fortification built four centuries ago and which has undergone successive refurbishments and seen various military uses, Montjuïc is also a mysterious place crossed by winding paths and covered with almost impenetrable forests.
    Our car pulled up on what was called the Morrot Highway in an area full of thickets through which wandered a group of cadaverous figures. Lacalle, who had grabbed a carbide lamp, began to make his way up a dusty path which wound around and around up the slope until we found ourselves some twenty yards above the place from which we had started. The trail skirted one of the sheerest escarpments in the area, and it was there where Lacalle, after lighting the lamp, slid through a cleft in the rock; a mineshaft entrance leading into a murky and foul-smelling grotto.
    “And